I once
had a vivid, powerful dream where I lay in some remote cobblestone street in Boston. I was
severely cut up, bleeding and completely immobile and non-vocal, yet conscious. All around
me were the rubble of the inner-city in decay, demolished brick and cinder-block homes,
lots strewn with glass. Off in the distance I could see my wife, JeanneE, bicycling
door-to-door to whatever houses were still standing and occupied. She was handing out
literature, leaflets and fliers. I kept hoping that she would come by and notice me.
Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, she did. Then she leisurely bicycled over to a
phone booth and made an emergency phone call for help.

Within minutes, sirens were blaring, getting ever
louder and louder, more numerous and closer. What appeared to be every fire truck,
hook-and-ladder, police car, ambulance, first aid vehicle and police cruiser was heading
my way. Even the ham radio and CB operators were out in force talking and coordinating on
their radios. I felt relieved that help was on its way. Then, as they approached closely,
they all passed me by, ignoring me as if I was not there. All alone, I awoke.

In what we perceive as reality or time, I was in a
hospital bed in the adolescent wing of Boston Childrens' Hospital. I had my second night's
sleep after the surgeons harvested my left kidney and transplanted it into our son, Dylan.
The vividness and intensity of the dream might have been a side effect of pain relievers:
percocet, morphine. Regardless, the dream did, in some ways, relate to my present moment
situation. In both my dream and my non-dream state, I was immobilized and hurting from the
use of a blade. In both cases, JeanneE was somewhere else (she was with Dylan).

I have often wondered the purpose and usefulness of
dreams. To obtain an insight into dreams, it might be useful to describe the sleep cycle.
Once we fall asleep, we enter into four successive phases of non-rapid eye movement or
nonREM sleep. Stage I is the lightest level of sleep where we are easiest awakened.
Interestingly enough, we feel as though we are daydreaming. Stage I lasts a few minutes
and when we do not awaken, we quickly enter Stage II. Characterized by deeper sleep, this
period lasts 10 - 20 minutes and makes external influences less noticeable. We then enter
stage III lasting 15 - 30 minutes where we are truly in a deep sleep with little body
movement. Our heartbeat and respiratory rates then become significantly lower as we enter
Stage IV, a period of 15 - 30 minutes of the deepest, body revitalizing sleep.

The sleep cycle then reverses itself from Stage IV
through II and then enters REM sleep, with rapid eye movement and increased heart rate,
blood pressure and basal metabolism rate. Although we may have dreams during any of these
stages, they are most prominent during REM sleep.

Categories

Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams serve as a type
of house-cleaning releasing psychological tensions. Nightmares may actually help us cope
with the traumas and dramas of our physical or psychic state of affairs both present and
past. In Basic Nursing, Theory and Practice, Patricia A. Potter and Anne G. Perry
state that "some theorists believe that people dream in order to forget." This
is an interesting notion and acceptable as long as we do not remember our dreams. When we
are awake our dreams are similar to memories. As time goes on, while maintaining the basic
essence of our dreams, do we not, like memory, add layer upon layer of extra detail,
intensity, interpretation, significance and importance onto them?

We do not seem to be as affected by our daydreams.
Maybe it is because daydreams are dreams while we are awake and usually entail a
gratifying event of our choice. Daydreaming may occur as an unconscious escape from a
boring situation, or a conscious diversion from an unpleasant circumstance.

Then, there is fantasy, which has been described as
an attempt to make the unreal real. Our fantasies are self-induced indulgences taking
place in a supposed safe setting. Fantasies are creations of our imagination, a fanciful
entertainment or deception. We would like to make our fantasies real yet we may realize
that might not necessarily be a good idea.

When we exaggerate, we participate in a fantasy.
When we walk about with anger in our heart we are involved in a daydream of our own
making. When we are afraid, lacking in love, we are functioning in a dream state. When we
are in a depression, we are in a nightmare.

Mind Creation

Just as it is possible to increase the frequency and
alter the content of our sleep cycle dreams through various pre-sleep techniques, it is
possible to change our waking state fantasies and daydreams. This leads us to the
interesting question of the differences between our sleeping and waking dreams and
fantasies. We operate from the assumption that our sleep state is an interruption of our
awake state. We go to bed in order to rest up for the next awake state. What if our awake
state is an interruption of our sleep state? Better still, consider the possibility that,
aside from the physical manifestations that differentiate sleep and awake cycles, our
dreams are the same except for their forms. Both the sleep dreams and awake dreams
are created by the mind. We are the orchestrators of and the performers in all our
dreams. Our interpretation of events seemingly outside ourselves make up most of our
daydreams.

The chaos in our lives, the fear, anger, jealousy
and judgment are awake dreams we chose to have. A Course in Miracles says,
"Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and
that because you want it you see it. And while you see it you do not doubt that it is
real...Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you. And what you
seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams. All your time
is spent dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is
all. Their content is the same." There is little to distinguish sleep and awake cycle
dreams. The word dreams can refer to both.

Although we easily accept that we create our sleep
dreams, we seldom consider that we are responsible for our awake dreams. Abrogating our
responsibility for our awake dreams is the ego's way of trying to convince us that the
dream is a reality that we want. If we are clear as to what we are and what we want, then
we awake to a world where love is what we are and love is everywhere, and it is for giving
away. All the fantasies of anger, fear and terror fade away. We no longer substitute our
ego-desired dream of guilt for awareness.

When I was a young child, I remember watching the
science fiction movie, The Eleventh Commandment. Planet Earth, upon establishing
communications with a supreme intelligence in the universe, discovers that it is doomed if
it follows its present course of behavior. Earth will be destroyed unless the eleventh
commandment is followed. This unwritten commandment is: love your brother as yourself.
This is the essence of waking up. It is putting aside our thoughts of separation and
specialness. Our chances of survival on Earth diminish as our awake dreams of hatred
consume us. Consider the deadly awake dreams that play out in the world's violent
encounters.

I opened this issue with a description of a very
vivid disturbing dream. I could easily dismiss it as, well, just a dream, induced by
medication. Years ago, I had what might be called an ongoing walking sleep, an awake dream
state called depression. There was little respite from the depression through physical
sleeping. This was my encounter with dreams that did not end over a prolonged period of
time. Why are we so willing to examine and evaluate one dream (sleep) while so unwilling
to deal with the other dream (awake)?

Our notions of sin are a dream. Sin is a mistake
open to correction. It is a mistake of lack of love and an investment in ego-based
separation. Condemnation is a nightmare chosen by the ego to convince us that we or others
are no good, not good enough or inherently bad. Being awake is the recognition that we
(and everyone else) are neither of these. Being awake is undoing our mistakes by letting
go of the past and seeing all our relationships as holy, that is, as forgiven.

While many seek enlightenment, few claim to achieve
it. Enlightenment and being truly awake are the same. Enlightenment is a higher goal of
consciousness attainment. It is being awake or absent of ego dreaming in the ever present
moment-to-moment. It takes very little effort to wake from our dreams. We merely have the
desire to do so, and we wake up.

Controls

There are controls which we give up when we dream.
During physical sleep dreaming we set aside the rational mind and along with it (for the
most part) the empire of the ego. Although our neural network firings produce emotions as
real as any when we are awake, we are at the mercy of random synaptic activity based on
the remnants of both our rational mind and ego constructs. We are not capable of
consciously choosing forgiveness during sleep even though we are not under the ego's
control.

While awake-dreaming, we most often, consciously or
unconsciously, give control to the ego, which is in essence a creation and a part of our
mind. Our disease with events, others, or our perceived life situation, can be a
signal that we are awake-dreaming. This dis-ease can be the alarm that allows us to
take control back from the ego. It is at this point, the place of accepting the
opportunity and possibility of forgiveness, that forgiveness takes place.

Dilemma

The dilemma of Chuang-Tzu (Third century BC):

One night I dreamed I was a butterfly,
fluttering hither and thither, content with my lot. Suddenly I awoke and I was Chuang-Tzu
again. Who am I in reality? A butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-Tzu or Chuang-Tzu
imagining he was a butterfly.

In The Understating of Dreams, Raymond de
Becker, a French journalist and television personality, a pupil of Carl Jung and
specialist in psychiatry and psychology, writes an extensive analysis of dreams throughout
history. He writes "To me the most remarkable thing about dreams is the fragility of
the frontier separating the dreams from what is conventionally called reality."

Our dilemma is the dilemma of Chuang-Tzu and
it is not. If our world is a bad dream or a nightmare then we are trapped not knowing
whether we are Chuang-Tzu or the butterfly. We do not know who we are. Our willingness to
forgive creates an awake state dream where we are both Chuang-Tzu and the butterfly,
enjoying the duality from the vantage point of both actor (or participant) and audience
(or observer). The show just goes on.

Death as a Dream

In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody published a book, Life
after Life. Dr. Moody introduced the phrase near-death-experience. Thousands of
people have claimed near-death-experiences. Nora Underwood writing in Macleans
magazine April 20, 1992, Between Life and Death, says that "one in three
people who recover from coming close to death or becoming clinically dead report having a
so-called near-death-experience. This experience is described as leaving and rising above
one's body, entering a tunnel, pleasant unfearful sensations, choices as to whether to
stay or come back, angels, music, the presence of loved ones, etc.

Underwood writes that the skeptics see the
experience as the "brain's dreamlike response to distress." She says there is a
connection between those who remember their sleep dreams an those who recall the
near-death-experience. To the skeptics, this is further evidence that the
near-death-experience is another form of dream.

Underwood reports on Rev. Albert Moraczewski of the
Dominican Monastery of Contemplative Nuns in Texas. Moraczewski suggests that the
near-death-experience may represent a person's coming face-to-face with his spirituality.
"This may be the means for them to wake up to themselves." We often wake up
when faced with a crisis or trauma. What if, like Chuang-Tzu, we can never know whether we
are the butterfly or Chuang-Tzu? Are we awake occasionally dreaming about dying or are we
dreaming about dying occasionally awake?

Our ego attempts to link our existence with the
body. It teaches that we should see death as our complete end. Thus, we accept the dream
of death as finality. We can, however, see our perception as mistaken, that we are more
than the body. Then death as the dream disappears.

Regardless of what we believe about the
near-death-experience, whether fact or neurophysiological response to physical
termination, there is some support for consciousness existing independent of the body.
Love exists independent of the body and if love is what we are then there we have it.

Samplings

Examples abound throughout mythology and history
where dreams affected the course of events, revealed insights into our existence or
provided clues to the mysteries of the universe. Examples include:

Mary, to whom the angel Gabriel, coming in a dream, tells Mary that
she is with child and that the child will save the world.

Constantine, who just before the battle at the Mulvian Bridge over
the Tiber against Maxentius in 312 AD, sees a flaming cross across the sun with the Greek
words that say, "In this sign you shall conquer." The following morning
Constantine "heard a voice in a dream commanding his soldiers mark upon their shields
the chi rho - the monogram for Christ."

Abraham Lincoln who, "Just a week before he was
assassinated...had a dream that he discussed with several people. It seemed that he was
walking through the silent White House toward the sound of sobbing. When he entered the
East Room he was confronted by the sight of a catafalque covered in black. He asked the
guard on duty there who was dead. 'The president,' said the soldier."

"Sir William Johnson had ordered some suits of rich clothing
from England. When they were unpacked, the Mohawk chief Hendrick admired them greatly.
Shortly afterward he told Sir William that he had had a dream in which Sir William gave
him a suit. Sir William took the hint and presented Hendrick with one of the handsome
outfits. Not long after that when Sir William and Hendrick were again together, Sir
William said that he too had had a dream. Hendrick asked him what it was. Sir William
explained that he had dreamed that Hendrick had presented him with a tract of land on the
Mohawk River, comprising about five thousand acres of the most fertile terrain.
Immediately, Hendrick presented the land to Sir William, remarking as he did so that he
would dream no more with him. 'You dream too hard for me, Sir William,' he observed."

While sitting in my car waiting for a colleague to
pick me up for a long professional drive to Burlington, Vermont, I pulled out a copy of Hyperspace
written by Dr. Michio Kaku. Hardly a book about a topic as esoteric as dreams, I was
struck by the serendipitous nature of what I read.

Srinvasa Ramanujan was a mathematical genius. His
genius was without advantage or access to western mathematical thought. By the age of ten,
Ramanujan had completed deriving on his own the relationships between trigonometry and
exponentials. Although he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, Ramanujan
completed three notebooks containing self-created theorems filling four-hundred pages with
four-thousand formulae. Ramanujan said that these came pouring out of his dreams. He
used to say "that the goddess of Namakkal inspired him with the formulae in
dreams." Neither Ramanujan or his British colleague Godfrey H. Hardy (who finally
paid notice to this exceptionally gifted Indian mathematician) took much notice of or
explored what Michio Kaku calls "the psychology or thinking process by which
Ramanujan discovered these incredible theorems."

String Theory

Then, there are the dreams of the
visionaries. After all, visionaries have visions. They imagine what could be, through
their waking dreams. They fantasize possibilities. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed,
"...that one day men will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content
of their character." Albert Einstein dreamed of the unified field theory bringing
together all the forces of nature, matter and energy, into one simplified fundamental
explanation. Unfortunately, after decades of research, he died without achieving his
dream. His dream lived (and lives) on through the pursuits of other dreamers such as
Kaluza, Klein, Yang, Mills, Hawking, Witten, Schwartz, Nanopoulous, etc. These dreamers
entered Einstein's fantasy world where a substance such as marble can explain all the
properties of wood through the superstring theory in hyperspace.

"According to this theory, matter is nothing
but the harmonies created by" point particles such as electrons or neutrinos that
"if we could magnify" them, "we would actually see a small vibrating
string." Recall the buzz phrases of the late sixties and seventies. A few include,
"We're on the same wavelength" and "good vibes" or "good
vibrations." Is it Chaung-Tzu or is it the butterfly?

While proctoring my last midterm examination in
general math class, an idea crossed my mind. What if the superstring theory offered
insights into what we are? Thus, I conjured up the Analogous Essence Super string
Theory (AEST). It states that the fundamental basic stuff of what we call being is
the vibrating string of love with all the notes, harmonies and symphonies that it can
produce. You would be impressed with the melodies and symphonies that DNA strands play
when a simple formula plots the amino acids as musical tones.

As dreamers and manipulators of the hyperspace
consciousness that is us, we can alter the ever present dream we are in. We can let the
love vibrations create the harmonious symphony of a loving world or, we can distort
through discord so our world resounds with the chaos of sinister orchestrations.

As the Buddhists say, the world is an illusion and
we should not get too excited about it. As A Course in Miracles teaches, we are
often in a dream chosen by the ego. As Hinduism states, everything is Maya, or
provisionally real. The illusion, the dream, the provisional reality can be not only
manipulated, but chosen. I suggest the Analogous Essence Superstring Theory further states
that we are responsible for and creators of our conscious universe through conscious quantum
choices. We direct our energy at the fundamental superstring essence of what we are.
We pluck the essence strings and create the symphony we wish rather than have the strings
plucked for us by the ego.

Since our existence can be thought of as a creation
of our multidimensional or higher dimensional consciousness, or our chosen Maya if you
will, we possess the capabilities of oscillating the strings, producing overtones resonant
with the analogous essence of everyone and everything around us.

The Debate?

In a conversation with Muslim children, Robert Coles
in The Spiritual Life of Children writes, "In response to further questions
about their dreams, Ramzes stressed Allah's capacity to shape dreams. 'He will send us His
words. He will tell us what to do. If you wake up and you remember a dream, it could be a
message from Allah. He could be telling you something.' "

Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles, had
at least three dreams that profoundly affected her. In some of the dreams, Helen is a
priestess. In others, she is having a conversation with Jesus. Helen's dreams, visions and
voices became dictation taken by her friend and colleague Bill Thetford. The almost seven
year process became A Course in Miracles.

Does God exist? The seeming inherent contradiction
between science and spirituality may in the end be the catalyst for the synergy of the
two, each adding evidence for the existence of the other. As a young Roman Catholic, I
often heard that God is love. Perhaps our scientific attempts to discover what the material
universe is made of, superstrings, will lead us to the discovery that it, and love as
the essence of our conscious universe, is one and the same thing. We then reach the
obvious conclusion: God is love. Love is all. We are love. God is us.

Meditation (Buddha)

Know all things to be like
this:

A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition, Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:

As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:

As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:

As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.